Vigil to Mark a Year Since Girl Was Taken

When Jerry Curry sits down to eat, he wonders whether his granddaughter, Jaycee Lee Dugard, is eating. The 53-year-old Corona man says he wakes up in the middle of the night haunted by thoughts of where the girl might be.

“I keep trying to figure out why and how,” Curry said of Jaycee, who grew up in Garden Grove and was abducted from her South Lake Tahoe neighborhood a year ago today. “I don’t do much of anything without thinking about her.”

Friends and relatives here and in El Dorado County will commemorate the anniversary of Jaycee’s abduction with candlelight walks and prayer services this evening as they continue to hope for information that will lead to her recovery. Area residents will gather at the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center in Westminster at 7:30 and stroll down Beach Boulevard to the American Legion Post, where Jaycee’s aunt, Tina Dugard, will speak.

Jaycee’s mother, Terry Probyn, will lead Lake Tahoe residents in their vigil. Like her father, Probyn always has Jaycee on her mind.

“I think about her when I go to bed and when I get up,” said Probyn, an Anaheim native who moved from Orange County in search of safer surroundings only months before the abduction. “I think about her when I go to the microwave to put a dish in, I think about her when I take a shower. It’s constant.

“Somebody stole something from me. I want her back,” she said. “It’s been a year, but it seems like only yesterday. I’m afraid to find out, but I’m obsessed to know.”

Jaycee, a blond fifth-grader, was half a block from home when a car described as an early-1980s Mercury Zephyr made a U-turn and its two occupants grabbed the girl, who screamed as she was pulled inside. El Dorado County Sheriff Don McDonald said investigators believe Jaycee did not know the people in the car.

According to Child Quest International, a nonprofit group based in San Jose, only 4% to 7% of the 359,000 children reported missing each year are abducted by strangers. The others are either runaways or victims of kidnaping by family members or acquaintances.

Groups of volunteers in Orange County and the Lake Tahoe area have met weekly nearly all year, planning fund-raisers and sending posters of Jaycee to schools, churches, gas stations, liquor stores and shopping centers in several states. Her story has been on two television programs, “America’s Most Wanted” and “Missing Reward,” and Probyn appeared on the Montel Williams talk show.

Friends planted a tree of life in Tahoe for Jaycee’s 12th birthday May 3.

“We need to find her,” said Marty Luciano of Irvine, a friend of Jerry Curry who is among a dozen Orange County residents at the core of the local search effort. “She needs to be back with her mother. She needs to be back home.”

In addition to the grass-roots community efforts, national organizations for exploited and abducted children have distributed millions of copies of Jaycee’s photo and collected thousands of leads.

The FBI has conducted 5,000 interviews and reviewed 150,000 criminal profiles, Probyn said. El Dorado law enforcement officers have spent “thousands of hours” on the case, according to McDonald, who called Jaycee’s disappearance “the most tragic case” of his 25-year law enforcement career.

“You never know which call is going to fit, which is the piece of the puzzle,” said Lisa Lyman, program coordinator of Child Quest, which got involved in the search for Jaycee the day she disappeared.